He shook his head by way of a response, in a manner that left her in doubt as to how much he had understood or even heard the question.
‘Drunk tank?’ Rodriguez asked quietly.
‘As good as.’
Rodriguez looked askance as they took a left at a roundabout. He hadn’t been here long, but had evidently established his bearings enough to know that both the nearest station and the regional HQ were to the right.
Dougal began singing again in the back seat.
‘Ali, ali, ali bally be, sitting on your mammy’s knee, asking for a wee bawbee…’
It was hellish, but he was in a world of his own, and they could talk.
‘Are we actually driving him home?’ Rodriguez asked incredulously. ‘Why? I wouldn’t even have lifted him. He was a bit pissed, that’s all.’
‘Local knowledge. The nightclub fifty yards away will be chucking out in half an hour. When he’s drunk Dougal sings for them on the High Street. Sometimes he’s after money or just attention. Sometimes he’s got a wee jag of aggression in him and he’s after something else. All it takes is some young guy who’s feeling a bit aggro and you’ve got a mess. Especially if the young guy has mates.’
‘So you take him out of the equation and all is calm.’
‘On a quiet night like this, why not?’
‘We’re a long way from Kansas, Toto.’
They drove a couple of miles out of town and dropped Dougal in front of a cottage so ramshackle it looked in imminent danger of collapse. He made an epic journey of reaching his door, but eventually he disappeared inside and a light glowed in the front window, their cue to drive on.
‘Now you really are thinking you’re in Hamish Macbeth.’
‘I’m thinking I can’t believe that place has electricity.’
‘Angus Gourlay, one of the duty sergeants, has known Dougal for ever. Worked alongside him in the rig fabrication yards up at Nigg Bay. Back in the seventies Dougal lived in a decommissioned army pillbox on the Cromarty Firth. He’s a rugged old soul: that’s why you don’t want him getting into any fights.’
‘Got you.’
‘Angus said that one time he turned up with a seal pelt he was wearing like a scarf. He had killed it for food.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Angus asked him what it was like, and Dougal told him: “It tastes a bit like badger.”’
‘All right, now you are making stuff up.’
She wasn’t, but it amused her to let him think so.
Around two they were both hungry, so Ali swung by a twenty-four-hour petrol station where the coffee was passable and the microwaved steak-bakes hadn’t poisoned her yet.
Rodriguez stayed in the car to monitor the radio while she went inside for the food. He was a veggie, he advised, calling out as an afterthought as she approached the sliding doors.
They were out of cheese pasties and vegetarian samosas, so she went to the fridges to grab him a sandwich. It was on the way there that she passed the toiletries section, stopping to take in the pregnancy test kits, almost mockingly positioned next to the tampons.
It might have made her laugh before, to wonder why the hell were they stocking home pregnancy kits in a twenty-four-hour garage. How could it possibly be something that couldn’t wait until the shops had opened in the morning?
Because not knowing was something you never wanted to prolong if you didn’t need to, she understood now. Knowing was better than not knowing: as long as the answer was the one you wanted, and not the one you were afraid of.
She wasn’t at that stage yet, though. She was only a few days late, for God’s sake.
She was brushing pastry flakes off her lap and out of the open door of the car when the call went out from Dispatch.
‘To confirm,’ she replied, ‘it’s a significant priority but not an emergency?’
‘Caller couldn’t say for definite what she saw. It was in her rear-view and she had been shaken up. The car might have left the road but from the sounds of it, it might just have disappeared from sight around the next bend.’
‘Isn’t this one for Traffic?’
‘Nobody available. Fat-acc on the A9 north of Carrbridge an hour ago.’
‘Roger. We’ll check it out. Uidh Dubh, did she say?’
‘That’s affirmative.’
A WOMAN SCORNED
The woman on the witness stand now was a senior manager at Alderbrook Hospital in north London. She was confident and clearly spoken, coldly neutral in her account of her trust’s most controversial former employee. Her relaxed manner was a marked contrast to the preceding testimony of Calum Weatherson, but Parlabane knew it was always a different story when you had a dog in the fight.
She gave a detailed account of what had happened as a result of the ‘Sexism in Surgery’ blog being hacked, though the relevance of it all was something the jury were going to have to take on faith at this stage. Parlabane remembered it well, one of those social media mini-storms that seemed so important to everyone following it at the time, but of which the outside world was blithely oblivious.
The first thing the hackers did was leak Diana Jager’s name and place of work. Within seconds of these details going public, anyone who googled her was able to discover what she looked like. That was when the rape and death threats came flooding in, from what Jager called the ‘legions of the angry maggot thrashers: invisible tough guys who wouldn’t have the nerve to say boo to me if we were the only two people in a locked room’.
To the first Twitter rape threats, all of which she re-tweeted, she replied with a photograph of a Liston knife, stating: ‘You say you’ll rape me. I say I’ll cut your balls off with this. Let’s meet up and see who’s bluffing.’
The knife photo was not a stock shot: she had taken it with her phone.
When Sarah showed him these exchanges, Parlabane was aghast. He remembered saying that either Jager didn’t realise garnering such a reply would be like a trophy to these bastards, or else she was psychotic. Back then he had meant it as a figure of speech.
She learned the hard way that you don’t get into a pissing contest with these people. In the days that followed, the rape and death threats escalated exponentially, but it wasn’t only the proliferation that made it far worse. She was fully ‘doxed’: her home address, landline and mobile numbers were published, then documents and personal photos stored online were posted on file-sharing sites. That was when the police got involved. Anonymous rape threats on Twitter are bad enough, but when you can be sure that they know where you live, it’s a whole other thing.
However, it wasn’t the threats that proved the most toxic fallout from ‘Bladebitch’ being unmasked. After Diana Jager was named, there swiftly commenced a retrospective game of join-the-dots, and the picture it revealed was not flattering. With the hospital where she worked widely known, it soon emerged that a male consultant surgeon nicknamed Leatherface worked there too, as did a female consultant surgeon fond of telling colleagues how she had returned to work after the births of her children.
This unleashed a quite colossal shit-storm, as the identities of her disparaged colleagues were revealed and disseminated, with intolerable consequences for their personal and professional reputations. It wasn’t only Jager getting hate mail now: Leatherface and Superwoman – named respectively as Terence Horgan and Holly Crichton – were pilloried and humiliated, their lives picked apart in online discussion like specimens on the dissection table.
The ensuing investigation threatened to get more serious still, as questions were asked as to whether patients might also be identifiable now that so much other information was in the public domain. This seemed unlikely, but the true significance of the questions was that they emerged from the Royal College of Surgeons, which had never come out well in the blog, and which presumably hadn’t taken kindly to being described as ‘institutionally sexist’.
The scalpels were definitely out for her, but Jager stood firm in the teeth of the gale. No evidenc
e emerged that patient confidentiality had been broken, intentionally or by extrapolation. And though she expressed solidarity with her colleagues for the harassment they received, she maintained that she had broken no rules and no laws. She had never named anybody in her blog, other than people who were already in the public domain, and had kept her own identity secret. The naming of Terence Hogan and Holly Crichton she described as collateral damage from an attack on herself.
This was very much in keeping with what Parlabane would later learn about her.
‘Diana is never in the wrong,’ he was warned. ‘She can screw up sometimes, and she can accept responsibility for the consequences, but that’s not the same thing. In her mind, Diana is never in the wrong.’
The distinction failed to help her on this occasion. Not having broken specific rules was not the same as being blameless, and there was little sympathy or goodwill on her side as a result of the underhand way in which she had got back at her colleagues.
The charge of gross professional misconduct did not stick, and officially she was not sacked, but only because the terms of her resignation were agreed between her lawyers and those representing the hospital trust. Not only did she lose her consultant post at the prestigious Alderbrook, but the damage to her reputation ensured that no major teaching hospital was likely to employ her again.
One of the conditions of the settlement was that she had to apologise in writing to Horgan and Crichton, which she did, but Parlabane had seen it, and the wording was as careful as it was revealing. She apologised ‘for the distress caused them’. She was acknowledging that it was resultant of her actions, but not accepting that it was her doing.
To be fair, the rest of the apology did seem genuinely heartfelt. She did not communicate in lawyerly platitudes, instead writing understandingly and at length about what they must have gone through and how angry they must feel towards her. She seemed acutely conscious of the hurt they had endured, and convincingly remorseful over what they had suffered. But that was something else Parlabane would later be told about her, by someone in this courtroom who had first-hand knowledge.
‘Just because you’re a psychopath doesn’t mean you can’t have emotional intelligence,’ she had told him. ‘And just because you have emotional intelligence doesn’t mean you’re feeling those emotions. Diana knows how to express the values that put people at ease. She knows how to come across as sympathetic and as empathetic. But what she tells you she’s feeling and what she’s actually feeling (never mind what she’s actually thinking) can be two very different things. It is part of her predator’s camouflage.’
One charge she couldn’t escape was her dishonesty over the imaginary correspondents to her blog, because that one was heard in the court of public opinion. She had lied about these accounts coming from third parties in order to conceal that these early articles were little more than score-settling. It was a form of what the French call l’esprit d’escalier: the things we wish we had said as we descend the stairs after an argument. Rather than argue her case directly, she had hit back in a way that was cowardly and anonymous, and a few observers noted that these were precisely the qualities she subsequently disdained in the trolls who attacked her.
Sly, underhand, scheming and ruthless – that was her MO. If you had made an enemy of her, you didn’t know you were under threat until it was too late.
Parlabane glanced across the courtroom to where she sat, her face impassive but oh so much going on behind those piercing blue eyes. He knew from experience that if you were going to go up against this woman, you’d better make sure you didn’t leave her standing. She didn’t forgive and she didn’t forget.
A few weeks after leaving Alderbrook, she quietly slipped back into employment, finding a new start in Inverness, far from the glare and glamour of the bright lights and the big city. Despite the baggage she brought, she was too valuable a prospect for them to pass up, like a provincial football team happy to take on a flawed talent who had fallen from grace at one of the major clubs.
Parlabane didn’t doubt she was grateful for the new chance, and she fairly knuckled down when she got there, but nor was there any doubt that she still had a substantial conceit of herself. A couple of years later she gave an interview to a less contentious medical blog, in which she conveyed enduring bitterness about the position she had lost and the circumstances in which she had been forced to give it up.
She had been the principal victim of a crime, she still insisted, and none of the subsequent wider damage would have happened had her computer security not been illegally compromised. She still blamed IT personnel at Alderbrook for the breach, and after the monstering she received as a consequence, it was clear she was harbouring precisely no conciliatory thoughts towards hospital IT personnel in general.
This was why it came as a very big surprise to many people that she ended up marrying a hospital IT tech. And perhaps less of a surprise that six months later he was dead.
A TIME TO CRY
Peter proposed marriage within a few hours of meeting me. He wasn’t serious, but given how things transpired between us, it’s worth dwelling upon for a moment; though I’ll let you infer your own significance.
‘I’m in the right place?’ he enquired skittishly, remaining in the doorway. ‘You are Dr Jager? And you put in a request for IT support?’
‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘I’m locked out of the system. Have been since this morning.’
‘Okay. Sorry about that. I’ll see what I can do.’
The first thing that struck me about him was the thought that he seemed vulnerable and yet shouldn’t. Actually, being completely honest, that was the second thing that struck me, but it was directly related to the first. Maybe it was a reaction to bracing myself for the presence of Creepy Craig, but I remember finding him attractive, a rust-stuck part of my psyche still responding at a primal level to the sight of something that pleased me, if only on a superficial level.
He looked early thirties but possibly younger; my judgement on these things was not the best. I had recently got into the consoling habit of trying to convince myself that people were actually older than they appeared. It was my desperate way of making myself believe forty was still young.
Certainly he wasn’t someone striving to present an air of grown-up gravitas. His hair was down to his neck, thick and black and shiny, falling across his face when he leaned one way or the other. Though he was dressed in regulation suit and tie, I pegged him for the trendy tech geek sub-genus, lesser spotted in these parts, as opposed to the basement-dwelling pasty-skinned goblin I’d been expecting. And yet, as I say, I got this meek and fragile vibe from him, something setting off my instinctive damage sensors. It was like coming across an item on sale that may look fine on the outside, but at that bargain price you know there has to be something wrong with it.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and sat at my desk. I was the one looking over his shoulder.
He didn’t ask me to walk through the process, but started running commands, though his expression suggested he didn’t like what he saw.
‘Where’s Craig?’ I asked.
I was concerned that if this guy couldn’t fix it, he’d have to call in the boss and I thus wouldn’t be spared an encounter with him after all. Yet at the same time, if that’s what it took, I wanted it done, and quickly. I needed this sorted, otherwise I’d be back to square one first thing on a Monday morning, because nothing would get fixed over the weekend.
Mainly I wanted to go home. I was feeling so exhausted and emotionally strung out that I had reached the stage where I suspected I would cry if someone said the wrong thing to me. Losing it in front of Craig because he told me my computer access couldn’t be restored until next week would be the final humiliation. And what was making me doubly anxious was that ‘the wrong thing’ might not necessarily be something negative. I feared if someone was solicitous towards me, it might actually be worse.
‘Craig? Is that who you normally get? He’ll h
ave gone by now. I was the one who drew the short straw.’
Something occurred to him and he looked faintly concerned.
‘I don’t mean as in dealing with you specifically,’ he clarified. ‘I just mean it was last thing Friday and everybody wanted to leave.’
He reprised the uncomfortable look, perhaps realising he was only digging himself deeper by implying that there was a reason why I might think this the case.
‘Quite,’ I said. My tone would have been more acidic had I not been clinging on by my fingernails and trying to neutralise my emotional responses lest the dam burst. ‘Why ever would I think otherwise.’
I guess my tone wasn’t quite as neutral as I was pitching, because he picked up on it right away. He looked anxious but good-humoured, as though trying to be tolerant of the fact that there was something going on that he couldn’t possibly understand.
‘Look, I don’t want to put my foot in anything here, but they were a bit coy back at the IT hub when I told them the job. Is there something I should know? Have you had a run-in with hospital IT before?’
There was a brightness in his eyes that I couldn’t read: either it was innocence openly appealing for a fair shake or it was malice disguised as the first. I was instantly reminded of walking back from one of the few football matches I ever attended with my brothers, the pair of them draped disconsolately in their blue-and-white scarves. A man stopped us to ask the score, and somehow I sensed he already knew, but wanted these young boys to tell him how their team had lost. He had a nasty little smirk as he said: ‘Oh dear. Too bad.’
‘Are you trying to be funny?’ I asked.
He took his hands off the keyboard in a supplicatory gesture.
‘I’ll interpret that as a yes,’ he replied. ‘I take it we didn’t cover ourselves in glory.’
‘You’re saying you don’t know?’
His hands rose higher, now more like a surrender.
‘Don’t know, happy to remain in the dark, happy to hear your version of it if you feel the need to vent. The latter might slow down my diagnostic efforts here, but it’s your dime.’
Black Widow Page 5
